In a reprise of the crypto wars of the 1990s, the U.S. secret state is mounting an offensive that would force telecommunication companies to redesign their systems and
information networks to more easily facilitate internet spying.

Touted as a simple technical “fix” that would “modernize” existing legislation for wiretaps, government security officials will demand that telecommunication firms and
internet service providers provide law enforcement with backdoors that would enable them to bypass built-in encryption and security features of electronic communications.

With the Obama administration rivaling, even surpassing antidemocratic moves by the Bush regime to monitor and surveil the private communications of the American people,
The New York Times reported last week that “federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet.”

Following closely on the heels of FBI raids on antiwar and international solidarity activists, the “change” administration now wants Congress to require all providers who
enable communications “to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order.”

Times’ reporter Charlie Savage informs us that the administration will demand that software and communication providers build backdoors accessible to law enforcement and
intelligence agencies, thus enabling spooks trolling “encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows
direct ‘peer to peer’ messaging like Skype” the means “to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.”

Calling new legislative strictures a “reasonable” and “necessary” tool for law enforcement that will “prevent the erosion of their investigative powers,” FBI mouthpiece,
general counsel Valerie E. Caproni, told the Times, “We’re talking about lawfully authorized intercepts.”

Really?

Caproni’s assertion that the Bureau and spy shops such as the National Security Agency are not interested in “expanding authority” but rather “preserving our ability to
execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security,” is a thin tissue of lies lacking credibility.

In fact, the state’s “existing authority” to spy upon private communications under the USA Patriot Act and assorted National Security- and Homeland Security Presidential
Directives (NSPD/HSPD) in areas as such as “continuity of government” (NSPD 51/HSPD 20), “cybersecurity” (NSPD 54/HSPD 23) and “biometrics” (NSPD 59/HSPD 24), have led to
the creation of overly broad and highly classified programs regarded as “state secrets” under Obama.

As I have written many times, most recently in August (see: “Obama Demands Access to Internet Records, in Secret, and Without Court Review,” Antifascist Calling,
August 12, 2010), since his 2009 inauguration President Obama has done nothing to reverse this trend. Indeed, he has taken further steps through the Comprehensive
National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), a highly-sanitized version of NSPD 54/HSPD 23, to ensure that the “President’s Surveillance Program” (PSP) launched by
Bush remains a permanent feature of daily life in the United States.

In a widely circulated report last year, the inspectors general from five federal agencies, including the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, noted that following advice from the Office of Legal
Counsel under torture-enablers Jay Bybee and John C. Yoo, “the President authorized the NSA to undertake a number of new, highly classified intelligence
activities” that went far beyond warrantless wiretapping in their scope, encompassing additional unspecified “activities” that have never been disclosed to the public.

What were once regarded by Democrats and their ever-shrinking base of acolytes, cheerleaders and toadies as unspeakable crimes when carried out by Republican
knuckle-draggers, are now regarded as “forward thinking,” even “visionary” policies when floated by the faux “progressive” occupying the Oval Office.

And with “homegrown terrorism” and “cybersecurity” high priorities on the administration’s to-do list, White House changelings and their friends from the
previous regime are pulling out all the stops.

Last week, speaking at a Washington, D.C. “Ideas Forum,” former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, currently a top executive with the spooky
Booz Allen Hamilton private security corp, said that cybersecurity is the “wolf at the door” and that a “large-scale” cyberattack “could impact the global
economy ‘an order of magnitude surpassing’ the attacks of September 11,” The Atlantic reported.

McConnell and former Bushist Homeland Security Adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, the current chairwoman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance
(INSA), a D.C. lobby shop catering to security and intelligence grifters, urged the Obama administration to transform “how it defends against cyberattacks,”
claiming that the secret state “lack[s] the organizational ability and authorization to prevent and respond to cybersecurity threats.”

Their prescription? Let NSA pit bulls off the leash, of course! Townsend said that “the real capability in this government is in the National Security Agency.”

True enough as far as it goes, however Townsend mendaciously asserted that NSA is legally forbidden from domestic spying, not that it prevented her former
boss from standing up NSA’s internal surveillance apparatus through programs such as STELLAR WIND and PINWALE, the agency’s domestic email interception program.

Both Townsend and McConnell claim that the “laws haven’t kept up” with the alleged threat posed by a cyberattack and urged the administration to give the
NSA even more authority to operate domestically.

No mention was made by liberal interventionist-friendly Atlantic reporter Max Fisher that McConnell’s firm has reaped multiyear contracts worth billions for
their classified cybersecurity work for the secret state.

Hardly slouches themselves when it comes to electronic eavesdropping, the FBI is seeking to expand their already-formidable capabilities through their
“Going Dark” program.

ABC News first disclosed the program last year, and reported that “the term ‘Going Dark’ does not refer to a specific capability, but is a program name
for the part of the FBI, Operational Technology Division’s (OTD) lawful interception program which is shared with other law enforcement agencies.”

According to ABC, “the term applies to the research and development of new tools, technical support and training initiatives.”

The New York Times reported last week that OTD spent $9.75 million last year “helping communications companies” develop “interception capabilities” for the Bureau.

Administration Hypocrisy

The administration’s push for more control is all the more ironic considering that the U.S. State Department according to Reuters, said in August it
was “disappointed” that “the United Arab Emirates planned to cut off key BlackBerry services, noting the Gulf nation was setting a dangerous precedent
in limiting freedom of information.”

As The Washington Post told us at the time, UAE securocrats claimed that “it will block key features on BlackBerry smartphones because the devices
operate beyond the government’s ability to monitor.”

Citing–what else!–”national security concerns,” the measure “could” be motivated “in part” by state fears that “the messaging system might be
exploited by”–wait!–”terrorists or other criminals who cannot be monitored by local authorities.”

That regional beacon of democracy, Saudi Arabia, said it would follow suit. In response, State Department shill P.J. Crowley said that the United
States is “committed to promoting the free flow of information. We think it’s integral to an innovative economy.”

With a straight face, Crowley told a State Department news briefing, “It’s about what we think is an important element of democracy, human rights
and freedom of information and the flow of information in the 21st century.”

“We think it sets a dangerous precedent,” he said. “You should be opening up societies to these new technologies that have the opportunity to empower
people rather than looking to see how you can restrict certain technologies.”

Pointing out the Obama regime’s hypocrisy, Yousef Otaiba, the UAE Ambassador to the United States counteracted and said it was Crowley’s comments that
were “disappointing” and that they “contradict the U.S. government’s own approach to telecommunication regulation.”

“Importantly,” Otaiba said, “the UAE requires the same compliance as the U.S. for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.”

The BBC informed us in July that Emirate officials are concerned that the encrypted software and networks used by Research in Motion, BlackBerry’s
parent company, “make it difficult for governments to monitor communications.”

Although this is precisely the autocratic mindset that rules the roost here in the heimat, corporate media report identical moves by the U.S.
government with nary a critical word, failing to point out the disconnect between administration rhetoric and ubiquitous “facts on the ground.”

Among the proposals being considered by the administration, the Times reports that officials “are coalescing” around several “likely requirements”
that include the following: “Communications services that encrypt messages must have a way to unscramble them.” U.S. law will apply to overseas
businesses, not just domestic firms. The Times avers that “Foreign-based providers that do business inside the United States must install a domestic
office capable of performing intercepts.” And finally, a kiss of death for privacy rights, “Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication
must redesign their service to allow interception.”

Firms that fail to comply “would face fines or some other penalty.” The Times neglected to tell us however, what penalties await software developers or
individual users who have the temerity to design–or avail themselves–of systems that bypass backdoors mandated by the secret state.

An Electronic Police State

Far from being an “enhanced security feature,” the administration’s proposal for peer-to-peer snooping would be a boon to hackers, thieves and other
miscreants who routinely breech and exploit whatever “firewall” grifting firms and their political allies devise to “keep us safe.”

In fact, as computer security and privacy researchers Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm revealed in their paper, Certified Lies: Detecting and Defeating
Government Interception Attacks Against SSL, secret state agencies have already compromised the Secure Socket Layer certification process (SSL, the tiny
lock that appears during supposedly “secure,” encrypted online transactions), and do so routinely.

In March, Soghoian and Stamm introduced the public to “a new attack, the compelled certificate creation attack, in which government agencies compel
a certificate authority to issue false SSL certificates that are then used by intelligence agencies to covertly intercept and hijack individuals’
secure Web-based communications.”

It now appears that the Obama administration will soon be seeking legislative authority from Congress that legalizes surreptitious snooping by security
officials and a coterie of outsourced contractors who grow fat subverting our privacy rights.

Commenting on the administration’s proposal in a recent post, Soghoian points out that when wiretap reporting requirements were amended in 2000,
similar arguments were made that strong encryption would “harm national security.”

Congress inserted language that compelled secret state agencies like the FBI to “include statistics on the number of intercept orders in which
encryption was encountered and whether such encryption prevented law enforcement from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted pursuant to such order.”

It didn’t.

However in a replay of the crypto wars of the 1990s, FBI general counsel Caproni brushed off breech of privacy concerns and told the Times that
service providers “can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text.”

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) argued a decade ago that “compiling the statistics would be a ‘far more reliable basis than anecdotal evidence on

“Since then,” Soghoian writes, “the Administrative Office of the US Courts has compiled an annual wiretap report, which reveals that encryption
is simply not frequently encountered during wiretaps, and when it is, it never stops the government from collecting the evidence they need.”

In light of statistical evidence provided by the government itself, demands that communications’ providers cough-up their customers’ private
data to unaccountable government snoops is quintessentially a political decision, and not, as mendaciously claimed, a “law enforcement”
let alone a “national security” problem.

In fact, while police and intelligence agencies “look through thousands of individuals’ email communications, search engine requests or private,
online photo albums each year,” they don’t “obtain wiretap orders to intercept that data in real time. Instead,” Soghoian tells us “[they] simply
wait a few minutes, and then obtain what they want after the fact as a stored communication under 18 USC 2703,” the Stored Communications Act.

“Unfortunately,” Soghoian avers, “while we have a pretty good idea about how many wiretaps law enforcement agencies obtain each year, we have no
idea how many times they go to email, search engine and cloud computing providers to compel them to disclose their customers’ communications and other private data.”

Therefore, “we find ourselves in the same situation as 12 years ago, where law enforcement officials were making anecdotal claims for which
no evidence existed to prove, or disprove them.”

As security expert Bruce Schneier pointed out, while the “proposal may seem extreme … it’s not unique.” Averring that sinister snooping laws were
“formerly reserved for totalitarian countries,” Schneier writes “this wholesale surveillance of citizens has moved into the democratic world as well.”

Citing moves by Sweden, Canada and Britain to hand “their police new powers of internet surveillance” compelling “communications system providers
into “actionable intelligence.”

On top of this, as Schneier and others such as Cryptohippie and Quintessenz have revealed, so-called democratic states, not just usual suspects
like China (whose “Golden Shield” was designed by Western firms, after all) “are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain customer
data in case they might need to be investigated later.”

In their 2010 report, The Electronic Police State, Cryptohippie informed us that data retention “is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial,
and that “it is gathered universally (‘preventively’) and only later organized for use in prosecutions.”

How does such a system work? What are the essential characteristics that differentiate an Electronic Police State from previous forms
of oppressive governance? Cryptohippie avers:

“In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check
written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases. The individual
can be prosecuted whenever the government wishes.”

As the World Socialist Web Site points out, the proposal by the Obama regime “goes far beyond anything envisioned by the Bush administration.”

While the White House claims that new legislation is needed to combat “crime” and “terrorism,” socialist critic Patrick Martin writes that
“the Obama administration has defined ‘terrorism’ so widely that the term now covers a vast array of constitutionally protected forms of
political opposition to the policies of the US government, including speaking, writing, political demonstrations, even the filing of legal briefs.”

Just ask activists raided last month by FBI bully-boys in Minneapolis and Chicago!

The American Civil Liberties Union denounced the proposal and called on Congress to reject calls “to make the Internet wiretap ready.”

ACLU Legislative Counsel Christopher Calabrese derided the move, saying: “Under the guise of a technical fix, the government looks to be
taking one more step toward conducting easy dragnet collection of Americans’ most private communications.”

Clamping Down on the Freedom of Information Act

Entreaties by civil libertarians however, are likely to fall on deaf ears in the Democratic-controlled Congress.

In a clear sign that the Obama administration is moving to clamp down further on the free flow of information even as they seek access to
all of ours’, Politico reported that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “appears to be on the verge of prevailing in
an attempt to put some information it receives from other intelligence agencies beyond the reach of Freedom of Information Act requests.”

National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter pushed through an onerous section to Intelligence Authorization Act legislation that
exempts so-called “operational files” from four secret state agencies–the CIA, NSA, National Reconnaissance Office and the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency–from FOIA requests.

Apparently the American people, long the targets of illegal driftnet spying by the intelligence and security apparatus, will soon find another
door slammed shut, even as the administration claims sweeping new powers, including the right to assassinate American citizens deemed “terrorists,”
in secret and without due process, anywhere on the planet.

And they call this transparency…

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global
Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read
on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily and Pacific Free Press. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance"
Planning, distributed by AK Press. Read other articles by Tom, or visit Tom's website.

This article was posted on Monday, October 4th, 2010 at 7:00am and is filed under Civil Liberties, Espionage/"Intelligence",
FBI, Legal/Constitutional, Obama, Privacy, Security. ShareThis
3 comments on this article so far ...

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1.

hayate said on October 4th, 2010 at 10:21am #

The faces of the thing change, but the totalitarian ziofascist/fascist creep continues, like a giant amoeba engulfing the country.
2.

shabnam said on October 4th, 2010 at 11:31am #

Is anyone paying attention to Sudan? The petty, petty, pettttttttttttttttttttttttttttttty servant of Judofascists, OBAMA, is
pushing Al Bashir to allow the partition of Sudan. This is another plot by the Judofascist to partition the Southern Sudan from the
country. That’s why the Zionist propaganda by “save Darfur” and hollowcaust museum manufactured ‘genocide’ in Darfur, with the help
of their puppet, Payam Akhavan, an Iranian Baha’i in the service of the Judofascists = Zionists, to limit Bashir’s movement to be able
to save his country from mass murderers. Obama is as stooge as Bush and Clinton willing to serve the interest of Zionism for a petty
job at the White House, instead of serving American people’s interest. Obama led to power by the Zionists for his dark skin since
Zionism is after North African countries around the red Sea and Suez Canal to bring them down through destabilization and partition
to control the water way in the horn of Africa and rub their resources. The genocide in Congo, however, has totally ignored by the
same group of Judofascists.
Shame on Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, petty people in the service of Zionism. The leaders of Southern Sudan are
supported and funded by Zionism and the United States. Bashir has no relations with Israel and do not recognize the apartheid state,
but the Southern Sudenese have an office in Israel as PUPPETS.

{US President Barack Obama on Friday led an international push to make sure two self-determination votes in Sudan, which
could lead to the breakup of Africa’s biggest nation, are held on time.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called a high level meeting on Sudan amid fears that a delay could lead to a unilateral
declaration of independence by South Sudan and a possible conflict. Obama spoke with other world leaders about the January 9
referendums in South Sudan and the small region of Abyei, both key oil producers, for which preparations are seriously behind
schedule, officials said. The US president discussed Sudan with Ban on Thursday and said that with the United Nations he would be
“focusing the world’s attention on the upcoming referenda in Sudan.”
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called Sudan a “ticking time bomb, and Ban has called the country one of his “top priorities.”
African concern will be highlighted by presence of the presidents and prime ministers of Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia
at the meeting along with the foreign minister from Brazil, Britain, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, India, and Norway, among others.
Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by a UN court on war crimes charges, will not be at the meeting.
Bashir will be represented by two vice presidents: Ali Osman Taha, who speaks for the Khartoum government, and Salva Kiir* who is leader of Southern Sudan.}

*Kiir in Persain means penis
3.

shabnam said on October 4th, 2010 at 11:37am #

Destabilization and partition of the Islamic countries is based on ” A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” by Oded Yinon.
Israel has no intention to have peace because waging war is part of zionist strategy to erect ‘greater Israel’. You must read the following:

Posted May-3-2011 By

sallyII

They use things called Lawful Intercept Routers that send a copy of any interesting traffic to the Authorities.

I think part of that long article (didn't read it all) goes on about encrypted phone conversations - which basically means GSM or equivalent 'on-air'. After the calls hit the towers they are transmitted encoded but unencrypted to the exchanges. Where microwave links are used the carrier is encrypted, but automatically decrypted at the exchange.

Posted May-4-2011 By

ElParcero

Posted May-5-2011 By

24038462

Fuck this shit. When the government fucks up the internet badly enough, which they eventually will, i'll go back to dial-up and toss my smart phone in the trash. I could really use all that money for my other hobby, collecting precious metals (guns and ammo).